Venter creates a synthetic cell

Craig Venter has done it. His institute has produced Mycoplasma mycoides which is a normal bacterium except that in his case, the whole genome was artificially assembled.

Paper in Science, press release

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Nature: Reactions of biologists (short HTML)
Nature: Reactions of biologists (long PDF)

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BBC, USA Today, Google News

The era of synthetic life has begun. Although Venter is technically not God, my opinion is that the future artificially created and engineered humans, if their inner working is qualitatively similar to the natural people, deserve human rights! But if they behave too badly, they have to be punished, too. ;-)